I'm running OpenSolaris with ZFS for my main fileserver. I originally went with ZFS because I heard so many awesome things about it:
- Automatic disk spanning (zpools)
- Software RAID (RAID-Z)
- Automatic pool resizing by replacing RAIDZ'd disks
- Block-level checksumming
- No practical single-volume limits
- "Coming Soon" deduplication
After poking at OpenSolaris for a while, it really bugs me. I know Fedora/CentOS and Debian/Ubuntu far better, and I'm used to the Linux way of doing stuff vs the Solaris/BSD version. I want to switch to Linux, but I don't know what to use for my FS.
I'm not willing to use FUSE or a pre-beta kernel to get ZFS. Btrfs has potential feature parity, but it's still not stable even now (months after I first looked into it). What do you recommend as an equivalent of ZFS (desired features noted above) for a Linux box?
Best Answer
Have you considered NexentaStor or Nexenta core? It's actively developed now that the OpenSolaris project's fate is unknown. Nexenta is also more GNU-like. The Nexenta Community edition is a good appliance-like implementation which leverages ZFS features and provides an excellent GUI. The Nexenta core is a stripped-down variant that's essentially a more usable OpenSolaris.
See: http://nexenta.org/projects/site/wiki/WhyNexenta